At least it’s not Al Sharpton leading…
I can’t believe you find comfort in the very fact that so upsets me. At least Kucinich has 2%. Maybe he’ll pull the upset.
And Gore endorses Dean.
McGovern vs. Nixon Part II comes even closer to reality (You know, a landslide for Bush because Dean sucks so much and can’t possibly beat him. And the Libertarians get an electoral vote).
It’s also a step towards a Hillary Clinton presidency in 2008 (which is quite possibly the worst thing that could happen to this nation. Even more so than Bush running the country. I mean, a woman in the oval office is fine, but hell if I’d let it be Hillary.)
No, seriously, why didn’t Gore run again?
Because that was his decision. Hell if I know.
I imagine Gore didn’t run again because he has absolutely no hope of beating Bush. As far as I can tell, the general mood after 9/11 was “Thank God Gore didn’t win.” It may not be the case that Gore would have handled things poorly, but Americans generally prefer Republicans on national security issues. That said, it seems more than a little unlikely that a Bush/Gore election would be anything like as close as the last one - i.e., Bush would win handily this time.
Not that he isn’t going to win handily anyway. The Democrats are in the process of nominating one of their least-electable candidates, which I don’t think is such a bad idea. After all, I’m a Goldwaterite. Still, Dean wouldn’t be nearly so hopeless a cause if he hadn’t shifted so far left recently. If he were still coherent about Social Security and could still garner support from the NRA, he’d be much more formidable.
Because there’s no way in hell any real politician would want to be anywhere near the democratic primaries this election. It’s like the California recall on a national scale. Whoever bashes the incumbent loudest will win, no matter who’s the best candidate. This is also why Dean is running. He seems pretty good at whining.
George Will doesn’t think Howard Dean is all that smart.
He’s right. And judging solely by his first paragraph (attention span? Peh), he’s right for the right reason.
I’d much rather see Clark against Bush in 04 than Dean. I mean, pledging to promote the research of faster-than-light travel as president is pretty damned cool. So what if it seems impossible? In the 1800’s it was held as fact that trains would never be able to travel faster than 10 mph. All Clark needs now is to host SNL…
Umm… I think you’re ignoring the fact that, in the 1800s, nothing about Newtonian physics required that trains not be able to go faster than 10 mph. You’ll note that current physics states rather clearly that faster-than-light travel isn’t possible. Now physics might be wrong, but I’d rather not give scientists money to research something they don’t think can actually be done.
Yeah, why don’t we go ahead and cure cancer and world hunger first…then worry about faster than light travel…
But that’s just me.
Now if Startrek is any indication of how the future will be, and of course it is, traveling faster than light will allow us to go to the future/past and thus allow us to cure cancer and/or steal a couple of whales to save the future! We win either way.
Besides, any discovery or theory in science will be challenged. Usually this results either in reaffirming the theory or disproving it, but it can also lead to an expansion of the theory with new discoveries while researching the theory. Science exists because we don’t know everything, so current physics is incomplete. We may discover new data that was unavailable before because of new scientific intruments that could possibly allow faster than light travel. In fact, I read about research on teleportation as the cutting edge research in quantum mechanics. Maybe that can be applied to larger bits of matter than single electrons in the future.
I would be SOOOOO ripped if Kirk tried to pull something like that.
Wait …
There is a terrible fallacy in this argument that is due in large part to general problems of induction. I’ll refer to David Hume for a more complete exposition of what I’m going to say, but I am also going to deal with things he doesn’t.
I’m tempted to just accept this because it’s such an uncontroversial thing to say, but I must point out that it’s almost certainly false. There are probably many discoveries in science that go unchallenged, and it’s reasonable to assume that there could be such a theory as well.
Usually this results either in reaffirming the theory or disproving it, but it can also lead to an expansion of the theory with new discoveries while researching the theory.
This is one potential explanation about advances in science. There is some reason to suspect, though, that this is not an adequate explanation of everything that goes on in science. For instance, take the paradigmatic view - i.e., the idea that scientific work is characterized by a certain fundamental set of assumptions, under which everyone works. The basis of this theory is neither affirmed nor denied because it is, in some sense, axiomatic. An example of this, though probably a sloppy one, is Newton’s concept of mass. Einstein’s theory neither confirms nor denies that Newton was right about mass - he CHANGES the whole meaning of the idea. So your characterization of science may be correct within any given framework, but I’m not convinced that it works generally.
Science exists because we don’t know everything
Huh? So, if we knew everything, then science wouldn’t exist? This may depend on the definition of science you’re working with, but I am not inclined to accept this statement as anything like true. Assuming that there are fundmental laws obeyed by the universe (which I think is a startlingly irrational assumption), it seems plausible to me that science, the field that describes those laws, would exist no matter how much we knew.
so current physics is incomplete.
This is either a non sequitur or an instance of the fallacy I mentioned previously. I think it’s clear why this conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise above, so I’ll skip that objection. The other one is that I’m assuming you’re basing this on the fact that previous physical theories were “incomplete” in that they did not accurately describe every phenomenon we encountered. Your inductive step here is a what I’d like to call an inductive leap off of a cliff. Because Newtonian physics was somehow “incomplete,” it most definitely does not follow that any physical theory (including the current post-Einsteinian ones) is also “incomplete.” I’m not sure that induction ever works (leaving out mathematical induction), but it almost certainly does not here, in that it explicitly rules out any chance that there might be a possible theory that accurately describes the universe.
We may discover new data that was unavailable before because of new scientific intruments that could possibly allow faster than light travel.
We may also discover new data that allows us to turn gravity upside down and talk out of our elbows, but I’m with Aaron on this: we have far more important concerns to turn our attention to (like problems to which our current theories suggest solutions).
In fact, I read about research on teleportation as the cutting edge research in quantum mechanics. Maybe that can be applied to larger bits of matter than single electrons in the future.
Maybe. Two things, though:
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Where did you read this? Is it anything like a reputable source?
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How much do you know about quantum mechanics? There are very huge differences between the behavior of any given electron and the behavior of folks. Electrons have inherent indeterminacies that are generally smoothed out statistically on the scale of people or cats or anything suitably large for us to desire to teleport it somewhere else. While it might be possible that we can work out a solution favorable to your hope, the unlikeliness of that far outweighs the unlikeliness of, say, eradicating cancer.
From the way science has been going, I bet we’ll get something worse than cancer once we cure it, like Smortrons, nanobots that eat genitals. Of course, I’m insane and off-topic.
Why must all your ideas involve eating genitals?
You mean when we cured smallpox and got… AIDS? I’m so confused…
Hahahaha!!! A little something for Aaron…
http://www.thbookservice.com/BookPage.asp?prod_cd=c6230
I’m laughing so hard I might be dead.
This is really the only reason I’m not a conservative. I secretly agree with all their principles and such…but the whole talking doll thing…I just can’t…